Sections

Twitter’s ability as an election-result predictor under scrutiny

Mark Blevis will be tracking how many times candidates and parties are mentioned in tweets in the run-up to several elections, to see whether Twitter presence translates into electoral success.Photo: Brett Gundlock/National Post

OTTAWA — Twitter’s ability to predict election results is being put to the test.

Mark Blevis, president of Full Duplex Ltd., an Ottawa communications firm, will be tracking how many times candidates and parties are mentioned in tweets in the run-up to the Oct. 8 provincial election in Nova Scotia, and mayoral races in Edmonton and Calgary on Oct. 21, to test the theory of whether Twitter presence translates into electoral success.

The idea comes from a study out of Indiana University last month that found winners of U.S. congressional races in 2010 and 2012 — in which there was both a Republican and Democrat on the ballot — corresponded about 90 per cent of the time with the candidates who received the most mentions on Twitter.

The authors theorized that Twitter wasn’t necessarily influencing voters, but was capturing the “buzz” around candidates who were striking a chord with the public, even when the mentions were negative.

Blevis said he’s intrigued by Twitter’s potential in this regard but remains skeptical.

“Part of me wants the theory to work and part of me doesn’t,” he said.

“In many ways, (Twitter) sucks the nuance and context (out) of the conversation, and this is part of the reason I’m concerned and I don’t want Twitter to be the indicator because without context, content is irrelevant.”

Still, Blevis said: “It’s exciting to think that, possibly, there’s enough information being shared by people voluntarily that allows us to make predictions like this.”

Blevis recalled that he became more open to Twitter’s predictive potential after studying data from the British Columbia election in May. He found that Christy Clark, who was re-elected Liberal premier, was the top candidate in terms of the tweet count, followed by NDP leader Adrian Dix. In this case, Twitter would have been a more accurate predictor than polls that indicated Dix and the NDP were poised to win.

Blevis said there is currently an insufficient amount of Twitter content to present numbers on the mayoral races in Edmonton and Calgary. But for Nova Scotia, Blevis’s figures show the NDP’s Darrell Dexter, the current premier, had the most tweets mentioning his name or Twitter handle between Sept. 8 — one day after the election was called — and Sept. 16.

Dexter was mentioned in 40 per cent of the 9,104 tweets that were both related to the upcoming Nova Scotia election and mentioned at least one party leader. The Liberals’ Stephen McNeil was second at 34.1 per cent, followed by the Progressive Conservatives’ Jamie Baillie at 24.3 per cent and the Green Party’s John Percy at 1.6 per cent.

When tweets are broken down by party mentions, the results are the same but with different proportions. The NDP was mentioned in 46.7 per cent of the 10,423 relevant tweets, the Liberals in 31.2 per cent, the Tories in 21.4 per cent and Greens in 0.7 per cent.

Such results point to a different result than a Corporate Research Associates poll taken between Aug. 8 and 31, which put the Liberals ahead with 41 per cent support followed by the NDP at 33 per cent. The parties were trailed by the Conservatives at 26 per cent and Greens at less than one per cent.

Tim Powers, chairman of polling firm Abacus Data and a political adviser with Conservative connections, said Blevis is conducting worthy experiments, but it’s too soon to say whether Twitter can mount a challenge to traditional polling.

“I think these tools are always complimentary; there’s no two ways about it,” he said. “And we’re seeing from a service-provider side that clients are asking for and we are selling to them, not just the gleaning of data, but analysis of what’s happening on social media and Twitter and how often they’re being mentioned.”

He added: “I don’t think it will replace polling because there’s not enough of a diverse sample body to be gleaned, at this point, from Twitter.”

Scott Reid, a principal at communications firm Feschuk.Reid and former adviser to prime minister Paul Martin, said that while he doesn’t dismiss the value of Twitter as a window to public sentiment, he’s not ready to put it in the same category as polling.

“It think that (Twitter’s) potential is enormous in a variety of ways,” he said. “I suspect that what Twitter is and enables five years from now will blow our minds, in comparison to today. But polling is polling because there is a scientific rigour. . . . Turning out to be right is not an indication of scientific reliability.”